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I have noticed that there is a lack of voting on answers and questions. There needs to be something that encourages people to upvote useful answers, or upvote good questions.

I've personally seen many answers of my own and others that are accepted as an answer but have no upvotes at all.

I don't really have a solution other then maybe some kind of tip thing telling users that they can upvote useful answers.

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    it's not just you
    – user19533
    May 4, 2012 at 16:39

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The central point here (well, to me!) is that there are many questions that have accepted answers, yet ZERO up votes. That has nothing to do with "drive-by" users, or lack of community. It means that the person who asked the question DID stick around long enough to accept an answer. If the person did that, then WHY couldn't that person at least click ONE MORE TIME, so that the accepted answer had a single up vote of appreciation?

This irritates me to no end! Obviously... Actually, it is not unique to WebApps SE. You are quite friendly and courteous here. I have seen this sort of thing, namely, accepted answers with zero up votes, on many SE sites, quite often.

I DO agree with @ChrisF in that there isn't a lot the system can do to encourage people to vote.

Oddly enough, there are registered users (again, on other SE sites, not on WebApps necessarily, though I haven't looked), who regularly ask and answer questions, over a period of a year or more, but NEVER ONCE up voted any answer. I don't know what is going on with that! It is probably a vagary of the human psyche. I am at a loss to explain though. (I wish I could directly deliver a lecture on the virtues of compassion and respect for others to such individuals, but, well, that isn't possible.... ;o)

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    You can accept an answer with 1 reputation point, but need 15 to be able to up-vote so while the user may stick around for long enough to accept an answer, they don't necessarily stick around to post more questions or answers to get that 15 points. Hence the lack of up-vote.
    – ChrisF Mod
    May 5, 2012 at 21:33
  • @ChrisF Well, you just addressed part of the issue: I forgot that one could ask a question with only 1 reputation point, and also answer with on1y 1 point, but cannot up vote. The other part remains an unknown. Suggest made by Fogest seems helpful meta.webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/1105/…
    – Ellie Kesselman
    May 13, 2012 at 14:51
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As mentioned by ChrisF, our community (those who are generalists in web apps) is actually pretty small. What you are not seeing is the anonymous feedback votes.

There are ways to increase voting by providing incentive, but one needs to make sure that once the incentive is gone the voting continues. For that, you need a community.

You could leave a comment stating why you think the question/answer was good to prompt other users into voting for it.

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    I got curious about the anonymous feedback votes you mentioned... Turns out there's a nice query on SE Data Explorer revealing what worked and what didn't for the large, google-wielding masses.
    – Jonik
    May 6, 2012 at 19:07
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There's not a lot the system can do to encourage people to vote (in either direction).

Part of the problem is that, unlike other sites, we don't have a "community" as such. Web applications is a broad remit and we get a lot of "drive by" questions (and answers) from new users who aren't used to the Stack Exchange system.

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    But is such a suggestion that I made to add some kind of tip useful?
    – ComputerLocus
    Apr 15, 2012 at 16:57

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